The significance of academic literacies in learning mathematics when students are becoming teachers: Learning from an "excellent” teacher educator

Author(s):

Kristin Helstad(presenting / submitting)Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke(presenting)Line Wittek

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 07 C, Enhancing the Quality of Teacher Education

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K1.04 Auditorium 3

Chair:

Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke

Contribution

All children and adolescents need to develop academic literacies in order to succeed in modern life (OECD, 2015). This requires teaching designs in which cross disciplinary knowledge is integrated and in which the close relationship between writing and learning is foregrounded (Lea and Street 2006). However, to design for such integrated teaching has for long been a challenge particularly in the teaching of “hard science” disciplines, such as mathematics (Neuman 2002). To integrate subject expertise with relational expertise across different domains requires the courage and capability to teach in new and varied ways, prepare students for uncertainty and not just adopt to institutionalised core practices (Edwards, Gilroy and Hartley 2002, Hargreaves 2003).

Such expectations put demands on teacher educators, because as Macken-Horarik et al. (2006) argue; only those student teachers who learn to control academic literacies can become teachers who will be able to scaffold these same competencies in young learners. However, we will argue, this is not a task that can be left to individual teachers only, but has to be supported by institutional structures and leaders who facilitate collaboration on new teaching practices. From such perspectives, how teacher educators in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) may facilitate student teachers’ learning of subject knowledge and skills integrated with pedagogy and didactics continuously warrant research.

In this paper we provide an example of an “excellent” teaching design in ITE through one teacher educator’s narrative on her teaching practice in mathematics and her students’ experiences with her teaching. This teacher educator (called Hege) was by her students described as quite unique and that the way she taught, had been especially significant for their learning outcome. The following quotation demonstrates a common opinion: “So we learnt more directly from her. She used didactics with us that we can use in the same way with our pupils when we become teachers”. What her students underlined was the way Hege engaged in teaching and how she facilitated peer response using different teaching strategies and feedback patterns. One student exemplified how Hege responded carefully to students’ texts: “We listened to her and got an idea about how it should be done”. The unison account of the quality of Hege’s teaching made us curious about how Hege herself described and reflected upon her own teaching. We therefore interviewed her to seek answers to the following research questions:

• What characterises Hege’s teaching design in mathematics and how does she use writing in order to scaffold students’ learning?

• What may be learned from Hege’s teaching design and what are the possible implications relevant for teacher education in a broader sense?

We unpack Hege’s teaching design and how she facilitates learning academic literacy in mathematics and the writing pedagogy in which it is embedded. At core is how she uses tools and strategies that scaffold student teachers’ learning. The study is framed within an academic literacies stance conceptualizing student writing as a socially situated discourse practice (Abdulwahed, Jaworski and Crawford 2012; Ivanic 2004; Lea and Street 1998; Macken-Horarik et al. 2006) recognizing the central role of literacy practices in the success, or failure, of students’ learning in higher education (Tuck 2012). The concept of teaching design is used to demonstrate the relationship between a design for teaching developed by teachers, and a design for learning developed by students when learning both the discipline mathematics and its didactics (Vestøl 2016).

Method

This study is part of a Swedish / Norwegian project on student teachers’ writing called The Struggle for the Text financed by the Swedish Research Council. It applied an ethnographic qualitative research design (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000) and includes analysis of curricular documents, focus group interviews with students and teachers about their experiences of writing and a collection of students’ written assignments in a 4-year ITE programme at a university college in Norway. This paper starts with findings from interviews with 18 students in which two teacher educators’ approaches (Hege in mathematics and Otto in pedagogy) were emphasised as highly influential on their learning (Solbrekke and Helstad, 2016, Wittek, Solbrekke & Helstad 2017). Although these teacher educators’ designs differed, they both emphasised writing as a social practice encouraging learning through a sharing culture with varied feedback from teachers and peers, high expectations and demands, and reflection on the relationship between theory and practice. In this paper we concentrate on Hege’s teaching and by interviewing her three times, we have been able to explore what – and why - she sees as significant in her teaching design while also mirroring this with the students’ experiences. We particularly asked about her own relationship with writing, conception of discipline-oriented writing, appropriate ways of using writing in ITE, and possible connections between writing and learning. All interviews were audio-recorded and analysed by all three researchers (the authors of this paper), first individually and then in collaboration. We applied an abductive mode of analysis inspired by what Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000) call “reflexive interpretation”, which is characterised by reiterative and critical reading of data interpretations. In this process, we benefitted from one of the author’s context knowledge and familiarity with the ITE institution, while also adopting a critical stance that arose from the distanced views of the two outsider researchers. We are mindful that the research design has limitations due to its narrow scope. However, interviewing one teacher educator in depth and with an initial inductive approach at several stages, allowed exploration of what was significant for the participant, rather than restricting it to only the researcher’s pre-defined focus. The interviews with Hege opened up to several general insights about the use of writing in mathematics - insights into what might be an example of innovative ways of teaching in ITE more generally.

Expected Outcomes

Our study contributes to an empirically informed understanding of how a rich teaching design including a varied repertoire of academic literacies scaffolds student teachers’ in learning mathematics; yet also initiate them into productive ways of teaching. What we also learned is that such teacher-led innovations, as is the case in our study, quite typically tend to be small-scale and sometimes short-lived, depending on time, resources and teachers’ personal priorities (Tuck 2012). However, we might question how sustainable these kinds of practices may be if they do not become more institutionalised. As Hege mentions, she misses the involvement and engagement of the ITE leaders. There are indications thus that teaching designs such as the one Hege demonstrates in our study may run the risk of remaining just as a local enterprise and maintain just as long as the individual teacher endures. In line with what Hege asked for, we thus argue that in order to make innovative practices, institutional leaders should see it as their responsibility to support new approaches and encourage collaboration on new teaching practices beyond the individual level (Helstad & Lund 2012). This requires holistic engagement with both structural and cultural conditions in the whole programme. We call for the need to acknowledge teachers who are prepared to teach in varied ways to scaffold students’ learning the multiple academic literacies required for coping with the uncertainty characterising the 21st century. Their teaching practices must be institutionally recognized by leaders who also understand how to develop structures and a supportive culture if they are to become more widespread and sustainable. In other words, new insights into academic teachers’ practices call for a response which is institutional, not only at the level of individual teachers but as a collective enterprise.

References

Abdulwahed, M., Jaworski. B and Crawford. A ( 2012).: Innovative approaches to teaching mathematics in higher education: a review and critique. Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education, 17 (2), pp. 49 - 68 Alvesson, M., and Sköldberg, K. (2000). Reflexive methodology: New vistas for qualitative research. London: Sage Publications. Darling-Hammond, L. and Hammerness, K. (2005). The Design of Teacher Education Programs. In L. Darling-Hammond and J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing Teachers for a Changing World (pp. 390–441). San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Edwards, A., Gilroy, P., and Hartley, D. (2002). Rethinking Teacher Education: Collaborative responses to uncertainty. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the Knowledge Society: education in the age of insecurity. Maidenhead, UK and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press Helstad, K and Lund, A (2012). Teachers' talk on students' writing: Negotiating students' texts in interdisciplinary teacher teams. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies. 28(4), s 599- 608 Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220-245 Lea, M. R., and Street, B. V. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172 Macken-Horaik, M., Devereux, L., Trimingham-Jack, C., and Wilson, K. (2006). Negotiating the territory of tertiary literacies: A case study of teacher education. Linguistics and Education, 17, 240–257. OECD (2015) Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills. OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264226159-en Solbrekke, T. D. and Helstad, K (2016). Student formation in higher education: teaching approaches matter. Teaching in Higher Education. 14(1), 73–94. Tuck, J. (2012). Feedback-giving as social practice: Academic teachers’ perspectives on feedback as institutional requirement work and dialogue. Teaching in Higher Education, 17(2), 209-221. Vestøl, Jon Magne (2016). Design, Integration, and Quality. Teacher Education from the Perspective of ProTed, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence in Education. Acta Didactica Norge - tidsskrift for fagdidaktisk forsknings- og utviklingsarbeid i Norge. 10(2), s 73- 91 Wittek, L, Solbrekke, T and Helstad, K (forthcoming 2017) “You Learn How to Write from Doing the Writing, But You Also Learn the Subject and the Ways of Reasoning” Outlines: Critical Practice Studies.

Author Information

Kristin Helstad (presenting / submitting)

University of Oslo

Oslo

Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke (presenting)

University

Oslo

Line Wittek

University of Oslo, Norway

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